NYAFF ’08 Awards Announced

The 2008 edition of the New York Asian Film Festival has come to a close. After 17 days of screening the best, brightest, and most bizarre the Eastern world has to offer it’s time to dole out some awards. In past years only an Audience Award was handed out but for the first time this year the fest had a sitting jury tasked with handing out an additional 5 awards to the field. Making up the jury were Vincent Musetto (film editor at the New York Post), John Mhiripiri (Coordinator/Big Cheese of the Anthology Film Archives), Dave Fear (film critic for Time Out New York), Maitland McDonagh (film critic for TVGuide.com and author of several books on film) and Benson Lee (director of Planet B-Boy).

So without further ado, this year’s winners are…

New York Asian Film Festival Grand Prize
SAD VACATION directed by Shinji Aoyama

Honorable Mention and Best Ensemble Cast
SPARROW directed by Johnny To
STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKES directed by Hitoshi Yazaki

Best Visual Achievement
Lee Myung-Se for M
Joko Anwar for KALA

Outstanding Achievement
Koji Wakamatsu for UNITED RED ARMY

Best Debut Feature
Ryo Nakajima for THIS WORLD OF OURS

For the Audience Award we would like to list the top five winners:

1) FINE, TOTALLY FINE (Winner of the Audience Award)
2) ALWAYS: SUNSET ON THIRD STREET 2
3) KING NARESUAN 2
4) PUBLIC ENEMY RETURNS
5) SPARROW

Congratulations to all of the winners, there isn’t a bad one in the bunch. I’m a bit surprised Dainipponjin and Sukiyaki Western Django didn’t crack the list anywhere, especially in the Audience picks as they are definite crowd pleasers. That just speaks to the quality of the selection that was offered up this year. I would like to personally thank Grady Hendrix and his colleagues at Subway Cinema for another successful year bringing a taste of Asia to NYC for the film starved!